


Get Down With the Lingo

by aggiepuff



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-20 09:07:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14257608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aggiepuff/pseuds/aggiepuff
Summary: Danielle Renard has been waiting seventy years to see her Soulmate again. She never expected to find him while on a mission with the X-Men.





	Get Down With the Lingo

**Author's Note:**

> I could not have done this without Whedonista93. Don't know what I ever did without you!

Tears run down her cheeks and her smile outshines the sun. “You are either very brave or very foolish,” she whispers, voice quavering.

Victor smiles down at her, fangs and all. “I can’t be both?”

Dani opens her mouth but, suddenly, Victor’s eyes roll up into his head and he slumps forward. “Victor?” Dani struggles to catch him, arms wrapping around his barrel chest. “Victor, can you hear me? Victor!”

“It’s okay, Dani. You’re safe now. Just step away and we can handle it from here,” a new voice says.

“Like hell!” Dani stumbles under Victor’s weight, falling to her knees, Victor landing facedown beside her in the dirt.  Four red-fletched tranquilizers sprout from his back. Dani snarls. Reaching into her satchel she pulls out one of her suped up grenades, the ones that put even Wolverine down for a solid thirty minutes. Holding it up, she glares at the X-Men, finger curled through the pin, ready to pull. “One more step and I’ll light you up.”

“Lingo, what the hell?” Cyclops yells.

“What’re you doin’?” Logan demands.

Dani ignores them, focuses on Jean. “Read me,” she orders the redhead. “If you think I’m bluffing, fucking read me and see. Anyone comes anywhere near us, I’ll blow all of you to pieces.”

Jean frowns, head tilting. A moment later, realization dawns. “You’ve been waiting for him a long time.” It’s not a question. She turns to Logan. “Call Cora.”

Logan scowls and pulls out his phone. His conversation with his wife is short then he holds the phone out to Dani. “She wants to talk to you.”

“Speaker,” Dani snaps, refusing to loosen her grip on the grenade.

Logan pushes a button and Cora’s tinny voice fills the clearing. “Dani? Watcha doin’?”

“Assholes tranqued Victor.”

“Victor? Your Victor?”

“My Victor.”

“That changes things.”

“No shit.”

“You know he’s Sabretooth, right?”

“Don’t care.”

“And he’s Logan’s brother.”

“Then we’re sisters-in-law.”

“You’re married? I thought you only had one night together.”

Dani blushes. “It was wartime. We didn’t want to wait.”

“Makes sense. Logan, if you would be a dear and bring Dani’s Victor back to the mansion? I’ll see all of you when you return.” Cora hangs up without waiting for the inevitable protests.

Logan closes his eyes, heaves a sigh. Anyone else on the planet ordering him around like that would be promptly disemboweled. Even the Professor. But Cora? Logan growls and steps forward. “We’re tying him up,” he informs Dani.

Dani stiffens.

“We’re not putting him on the jet without tying him up,” Cyclops snaps. “He’s tried to kill all of us.”

Dani’s eyes narrow, grip on the grenade tightening.

“Shut up, Summers.”

Jean edges towards them. “We won’t hurt him,” she promises. “But Scott is right. Sabretooth is too dangerous to leave unrestrained.”

Silence stretches between them, tense and heavy. Finally, slowly, Dani lowers the grenade, releasing her grip on the pin, but she doesn’t put it back in her bag. She pulls out the heavy knife from the sheath inside her boot, the one she’s carried since the Nazi’s invaded Paris. The look she gives Logan is pure steel when the other mutant moves in to clamp power-dampening manacles around Victors wrists and ankles.

Logan glares back but, for once, doesn’t open his mouth. He grits his teeth and hauls Victor into a fireman’s carry.

They’re halfway over the Atlantic when Victor stirs. Logan promptly stabs another five tranqs into his arm. Dani snarls. “What was that for?”

“I am not having him wake up before we’ve got him locked away back at the mansion.”

“Logan is right,” Jean says, resting a gentle hand on Dani’s shoulder. “Sabretooth is…volatile at best. It would be better for him to wake up in a place where we won’t all fall to our deaths if something goes wrong.”

Dani glances at the other woman then looks away. She doesn’t want to admit it, she’s waited  _ so long _ to have him back, but she’s heard stories about Sabretooth. Volatile is the nice way of describing him. Psychotic, animalistic, bat shit crazy, and rhino with rabies have also been used. A small part of her worries for their future, wonders if he’ll even still want her. The larger part doesn’t care about the future, only the here and now.

Logan carts Victor’s still-unconscious body to one of the larger medical rooms in the mansion’s basement. It’s the one reinforced to withstand Juggernaut-level strength, designed to contain students who might lose control of their mutation if they’re hurt or sick. He dumps Victor onto the hospital bed then stalks out, shooting Cora a look as he passes her in the doorway.

Cora Redrock, a solidly built Native American woman of average height with crow black hair, red-brown skin, and flashing emerald eyes, smiles at her soulmate, gently touching his bicep before stepping into the room. Dani watches her approach. She’s known Cora for a long time, from before she was essentially immortal. Cora is the  _ reason _ she’s immortal. Phantom pain aches in her gut. Without Cora, the shrapnel that had torn her apart seventy years ago would have killed her.

Cora looks down at the man on the bed. Manacles still bind his wrists and ankles but, if Dani looks at just his face, he could be sleeping peacefully. Drool trickles from the corner of his mouth. Cora’s lips twitch. “We used to be friends,” she says suddenly. “Before. When I first met them, the Howlett boys, back when Logan was Jimmy and they were real brothers.” She frowns. “I think it was the late 1800s. After the Civil War, definitely before the turn of the century.” Her face twists. “I’m terrible with dates. We didn’t used to keep track so much, you know?”

Dani nods. “What’re you going to do?”

Cora raises an eyebrow. “I have to do something?”

Dani scowls at her. The Professor’s name might be on the building but everyone inside Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters knows Cora is the one who actually runs the place. Comes from having been the Professor’s nanny.

Cora shakes her head. “I’m not going to do anything—not yet. It’ll all depend on how it goes when he wakes up.”

“How it goes?”

“Sabretooth isn’t one of the good guys, Danielle,” Cora sighs. “He’s Magneto’s preferred enforcer, does mercenary work—wet work—for the highest bidder. He attacked Summers when Summers was a teenager because Stryker wanted him for his mutant experiments.” Cora tilts her head. “The man has a list of sins longer’n the Grand Canyon. If he wasn’t your Soulmate we’d turn him over to SHIELD for permanent incarceration.”

Dani stiffens.

“If,” Cora reassures her, “I said if. Since he  _ is _ your Soulmate, we’ll need to see what he’ll agree to. If we could get him to work with us—do you know how great that would be? Those stories about him aren’t exaggerated. He’s a one-man army. Would definitely make up for losing Amazon to SHIELD.”

“I thought you were done with wars.”

Cora snorts. “I’m not going to go looking for a fight, but you weren’t here when Stryker came after us. Last time I was that scared, my people were slaughtered. Anything I can do to keep that from happening again, I’ll do it.”

“What about Logan?”

“If Victor chooses to stay, you let  _ me _ deal with Logan. Just,” Cora looks at her, green eyes soft, “just know, if he doesn’t stay, know you’ll always have a place here.”

Dani tries to smile. “Thank you,  _ shils aash _ .”

 

**-#-#-#-**

 

Dani settles into the chair beside the bed after she removes the shackles, pulling out her phone. It’s StarkTech with a fully charged twelve-hour battery. She pulls up the Bejewled app and is on level 113 with 16% battery when Victor finally stirs. She freezes, watching. Victor’s hand twitches. She sits up, holding her breath.

Suddenly, Victor leaps from the bed with a roar. He grabs her by the throat, slamming her into the ground. Stars explode behind her eyes. Dani’s hands wrap instinctively around his wrists, but she doesn’t fight, goes limp. He snarls, brown eyes raging. He crouches over her for several long, tense moments. Dani waits, refusing to look away but not making a sound. If he kills her, well, that’s okay. She’s lived longer than she was supposed to anyway.

S lowly, so slowly, Victor’s grip around her neck loosens. He stares down at her, nostrils flaring. “How do you have her face?” he demands.

" I have my face.”

“You’re a shapeshifter,” he growls. “She is dead. You stole her face.”

Dani shakes head, fighting tears. “I’m not dead. I’m here.” She reaches out. Victor flinches back. She stops, hands halfway to his face. “Victor, my Victor.” She smiles that megawatt smile again. “I knew you would find me again.” She pulls the heavy locket from under her shirt slowly, pops it open. The note inside is yellow with age, crumpled at the edges, but the thick black handwriting is clear. “I knew you would find me,” she repeats. “You promised.”

Victor trails a finger down the chain, picks up the note, reads it. _ I will find you again -VC _ . A purr rumbles in his chest. He places the note back in the locket and snaps it shut. Keeping his hand wrapped around the oval no bigger than the length of his thumb, his sits back. Dani shuffles into a sitting position, her face inches from Victor. Something darker, predatory, proprietary, enters his eyes. “Where am I?” he rumbles.

Dani blinks. “You’re at Xavier’s.” She’ll tell him anything, as long as he keeps looking at her like that.

“Why?”

“I teach here.”

Victor’s mouth twitches. “You’re a teacher.”

“It’s my mutation. I know languages, any language.”

“Do you heal, too?”

Dani shakes her head, the chain in his hand clinks. “No.”

“Then how?”

“Cora says she knew you?”

Victor frowns. “Jimmy’s girl? Yeah, I knew her.”

“Cora heals and if she gives someone a blood transfusion they heal faster for a while, too.”

“She gave you some of her blood.”

“The day after you left, our camp was bombed. I got hit and Cora gave me some of her blood. There was so much damage though. I should have died instantly. She had to keep giving me blood. By the time all the shrapnel was out and they knew I was going to survive, she’d given me so much it permanently changed my physiology. I don’t heal, not like she does, not instantly, but I don’t age either.” Her mouth twitches. “Don’t tell the kids though. They’ll start calling me Vampire.”

Something flickers across Victor’s face. “You won’t die.”

Dani shrugs. “Unless someone murders me, no.”

Victor starts forward until he’s all but wrapped around her where she sits. “No one,” he growls, “no one will ever hurt you. You are  _ mine _ .”

Dani beams, snuggles into his chest, loving the way Victor’s arms cradle her. “Yours,” she agrees. She tilts her chin to look into his face. “But that means you’re mine, too.”

Victor purrs.

Cora finds them on the floor, Victor propped against a wall, Dani sleeping in his lap. She slips through the door and closes it softly behind her. Victor watches her, grip on Dani firm. Cora leans on the door, folding her arms. He smirks at her. “Long time no see.”

Cora smirks back. “You know, I never figured you for Dani’s Victor.”

“And why is that?’

“Dani is…quiet. You are not.”

Victor snorts. “I can be quiet.”

Cora rolls her eyes. “I don’t mean quiet as in no noise. I mean quiet as in subtle. She was a spy for the French Resistance, faded to the background and the Germans never even knew she was there. You’re about as subtle as a hot pink dancing elephant,” she eyes him speculatively, “and about as big as one, too.”

Victor smirks. “Not my fault I’m so memorable.”

Cora glances at the locket laying against Dani’s chest. “I could never figure out why I knew that locket. You had it back at the ranch. The hands teased you about it until you broke what’s-his-name’s arm. Jimmy—Logan—he said the locket belonged to your mother.”

Victor scowls. “Didn’t have time to find a ring.”

A smile tugs at the corner of Cora’s mouth. “She said it was a gift from her Victor. She always called you that. Her Victor.”

Victor sneers at her. “What’s your point?”

She shrugs. “Don’t really have one. Just, she does a lot of good here but if you choose to leave she’ll probably follow. She’s like that. She’s been waiting for you for a long time. She’s not going to let you go unless you make her.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Hell if I know, but you Howlett boys seem to have propensity for stupid.”

“Nah, that’s just Jimmy.”

Cora grins. “So you’ll stick around?”

“I have a choice?”

“We always have choices, Victor.”

Victor eyed the white walls and handle-less door. “Doesn’t seem like it, since I’m stuck in here.”

“Well, there are kids here and you have a history.”

“I thought you White Hats were all about second chances.”

Cora snorts. “Who said I was a White Hat? I look better in gray.”

**Author's Note:**

> shils aash – Athabaskan – my friend


End file.
